Many electrical and optical systems, such as integrated circuits, system-on-chip (SoC) architectures, very large scale integration (VLSI) systems, and printed circuit boards, include circuit components linked by wireline or optical communication channels. These channels facilitate data exchange between the components, as in the case of chip-to-chip communication over backplane channels.
The increasing performance capabilities of many widely used applications, such as high definition video streaming and other computationally heavy applications, have placed increasingly high demands for processing speed on the underlying data processing systems that drive these applications. To support the high processing speeds required by many applications, communication channels between chips of a processing system—or between interconnected processing applications—must be capable of transmitting data at high speeds between components while maintaining low loss and high transmission fidelity. Equalization circuits, such as n-tap finite impulse response (FIR) transmit equalizers, are often used to pre-shape data signals prior to transmission across these communication channels to counteract the effects of channel loss and intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by these channels due to skin effect or dielectric loss.
The above-described description is merely intended to provide a contextual overview of current techniques and is not intended to be exhaustive.